Worlding the Western

Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community

Neil Campbell

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781647790554
• eBook ISBN: 9781647790561
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Worlding the Western views the fiction of the Western United States as a focal point for a reexamination of the consequences of the exceptionalism and closed borders of the Trump Era. At a time of bounded individualism, new nativism, climate emergency, and migration crises, author Neil Campbell argues that fiction offers opportunities to challenge the dark side of globalization. He proposes worlding as a different and more open form of politics.

Diversity, disparity, and opposition are central to the dynamic frictional fiction considered in this book. The American West provides a powerful test case in which these features are present and yet, historically, have often been masked or denied in the rush toward unanimity and nation building. Worlding is, therefore, a positive, critical concept through which to view the notion of a single world under pressure.
 

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Enter West
• Chapter 1. On Worlding
• Chapter 2. “What West?”: Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance
• Chapter 3. “What World We Making?”: Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End
• Chapter 4. “The World in All Its Workings”: Téa Obreht’s Inland
• Chapter 5. “A Land of Missing Things”: C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold
• Chapter 6. To Remember Otherwise and Against—: Tribalography, Robin Wall Kimmerer, LeAnne Howe, and Tommy Orange
• Chapter 7. “The Story and the Archive of the Story”: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive
• Chapter 8. Exit West—: Conclusions Perhaps
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author